1. Field of the Invention
The present invention related to medicaments useful for preventive and/or therapeutic treatment of obesity, and to medicaments for improving lipid metabolism.
2. Related Art
Obesity is caused by insufficient exercise or habitual hyperphagia, or by metabolic disturbance due to genetic causes or endocrine diseases and other. Obesity may be a risk factor that causes various adult diseases such as myocardial infarct or arterial sclerosis, and it may also be a cause for deteriorating these diseases. Therefore, early therapeutic and preventive treatment of obesity is very important. Diet therapies or exercise therapies have been applied heretofore as the treatment of mild obesity, and drug therapies are sometimes used for serious obesity in combination with these therapies.
Hormone drugs, metabolic accelerators and other have been used heretofore for drug therapies of obesity and lipid metabolic disorder. For example, androgens such as dehydroepiandrosterone and 3-keto-.DELTA..sup.9 -19-norsteroid are known to have anti-obesity action (Japanese Patent Unexamined Publication No. (Hei)2-275895/1990). These androgens are considered to activate intramuscular anabolism to induce the consumption of depot lipid. It is also known that 3-ketosteroids such as 4-cholesten-3-one (Japanese Patent Unexamined Publication No. (Hei)5-170651/1993) and 5-cholesten-3-one (Japanese Patent Unexamined Publication No. (Hei)7-165587/1995) have reducing activity on serum lipid and anti-obesity action. However, the aforementioned cholestenones, which have the enone structure derived from cholesterol, may possibly be absorbed and accumulated in the body, and therefore, they are not satisfactory medicaments from a viewpoint of safety.
The object of the present invention is to provide a medicament for the treatment of obesity and a medicament for improving lipid metabolism. More specifically, the object of the present invention is to provide a highly safe medicament for the treatment of obesity and a medicament for improving lipid metabolism which are not absorbed and accumulated in the body.